Currently, medication delivery systems are limited due to the number of parties involved in medicating a hospitalized patient, and a lack of complete, consistent information provided to all parties. Typically, physicians write prescriptions for patients. Pharmacists fill and dispense the prescriptions without knowledge of the patient's infusion setup (route of administration of the various drugs prescribed is often unspecified or underspecified). Nurses are responsible for administering the prescribed drugs according to instructions from both the physicians and pharmacists. This leads to nurses making critical decisions about infusion setup and drug administration, which can lead to errors. In particular, the above workflow can, among other things, lead to unnoticed drug incompatibilities, inadvertent bolus, excessive lag time, and errors in the “five rights” of drug administration (ensuring the right patient, right drug, right dose, right time, and right administration route).
Pharmacists lack the ability to see the physical infusion system as created by the administering nurses. Accordingly, the pharmacists rely on the patient's medical record when checking and filling prescriptions. Nurses manually map, label, and trace the various infusion lines. The nurse also manually selects a route, port, and catheter hub for a newly-added drug deliverable by infusion, and manually records this information in the patient's medical administration record (MAR). Typically, a single nurse is responsible for many patients throughout a shift, and is constantly receiving, discharging, and transferring patients. Accordingly, medical records may lack the specificity required for a pharmacist to fully verify that there are no undesired drug interactions.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a system for health care professionals to view an accurate representation of a patient's infusion map in real time. Likewise, there is a need to provide a system that aids clinicians in accurately recording the patient's infusion map in his or her medical record. Likewise, there is a need to provide a system that models infusion setups to aid decision making and execution by clinicians to reduce medication errors and save time.